Instruction Sheet For Drinking In Naperville

It’s all come down to this; if you want to enjoy an evening in downtown Naperville, you will need an instruction sheet. And by ‘you’ I mean anyone who comes close to touching an adult beverage, be it a customer, an owner, a server, a bus boy, the police, the guy who delivers it on a truck, the guy who prints the menus, and all the attorneys lined up to file a suit against anybody and everybody involved with alcohol in Naperville.

That’s what the Naperville city council has accomplished with their lame effort to regulate the serving of alcohol in an attempt to regain control of downtown Naperville after midnight. What they have really done is kick the can down the road and given the problem to the next Naperville city council when chaos amps up in the spring. By that time, members of the current city council may all be all gone either by their choice, or the choice of voters who have had enough from the current council.

The effective solution to the problem is simple; reduce the number of liquor licenses in the downtown area, and  cut back the hours of serving alcohol. A couple of council members approached the idea, but quickly backed off in lieu of having the next city council deal with it; clear evidence that Naperville is lacking in leadership.

There is a saying that “those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it”. When our country was founded, the topic of slavery and how to deal with it was a concern. In order to get ‘everyone’ on board with our Constitution, and solidify the framework of our country, they decided to pass the inevitable problem on to a future congress and president, and hence the seeds to the Civil War were planted.

Not that Naperville’s downtown alcohol problem equates to the Civil War, but the likelihood that things will get worse during late night Naperville rather than better appears guaranteed by this city council.

Who would have guessed that during the last Naperville city council meeting on October 7, while discussing additional regulation on the serving of alcohol, the three people who made the most sense were council members Bob Fieseler, Judith Brodhead, and city attorney Mike DiSanto. Brodhead had to get council members back on the track a few times, DiSanto had to keep them on the track, and Fieseler wondered why they were even on the track.

Councilman Bob Fieseler perfectly nailed it three times, when he first referred to a “senseless motion”:

Then when he labeled the process as “incomprehensible”:

And finally when he stated, “this whole process has become so flawed and convoluted and internally inconsistent, that I have no idea how to enforce or implement the ordinances:

An instruction sheet, for the rest of us, would be helpful.